Alastair Adams – owner and designer at Conway Stewart – talks licensed luxury pens

Thanks for joining me, Alastair. You’re the owner of the luxury pen company Conway Stewart… How come?
Well… For 16 years, I was managing director of the glazing division for Pilkington…

Pilkington the glazier?
Yes – and I know: going from glass to pens is a bit of strange, isn’t it?!

Ha! Well, that’s why I wanted to check!
In any case, I built that business up, but the parent company decided they were going to sell in 2006. I was in my mid-forties, and thought: what do I do now? So I sent out some emails, then someone contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in resurrecting an old, British luxury brand. And I said, “Not really, but send me the details.” That turned out to be Onoto pens.

Oh, yes? Still going…
Still going. Back then, they had a money man who’d spent quite a lot of money trying to resurrect the brand and hadn’t really got anywhere. But it sounded really interesting, so I got involved… I learnt a lot about pens, built the business up and then sold my shares.

Roughly when was this, Alastair?
This would be in 2014. Around the same time, I’d been approached by the then-owner of Conway Stewart who said I’d done a great job at Onoto and asked if I could go and help them. I thought I could, so I became the MD to try and help – and I did start to turn the business around… But then, for his personal reasons, he decided to put the business into administration. That could have been the end of Conway Stewart. However, my colleagues persuaded me that we should bid at the auction… We ended up buying most of the stock and all the technical drawings and designs from the administrators. So we resurrected it – like a Phoenix, really. So from 2015, we just built the business back up.

And you say “we”?
Yes: me, my son, Peter Robinson and David Cooper. We’re the shareholders.

Well, it amazes me! You’ve gone into that whole industry and really thrived without having a particular burning passion for pens…
I think it’s one of those occupations that you get sucked into though, because of the people. I’ve dealt with Rolls Royce, I’ve dealt with the Churchill family. I’ve dealt with the military… I’ve been up to the RAF museums – and just got sucked into some fascinating stories.

Let’s talk about some of those licences, Alastair. Because when you’re looking at Winston Churchill, say… Just his name is a brand! So how does the Churchill brand translate to a pen? What’s the process?
Well, we were slightly lucky with Churchill because the previous owners of Conway Stewart had already launched a Churchill pen… Purely because Churchill was known to have actually used Conway Stewart pens. We’ve got a letter in the archives – from 10 Downing Street – thanking Conway Stewart for making pens for him during the Second World War.

A particular type of pen?
Yes! Conway Stewart made three particular pens for him because they were out of production. As a consequence of that, they then launched a Churchill pen back in the late 1990s. With us, though, what happened later was quite interesting. As you may know, the Churchill family have a charitable foundation for educational purposes; to keep alive the wise words of Churchill for future generations. It does lectures, it does competitions for children, it funds students to do courses.

Anyway, they wanted to help raise funds, so they said they’d allow use to use certain copyright images if some of the money from the sale of each pen went back to the Churchill Heritage charity. And their original idea was to sort of show me all the family photographs they had and work off those. But I said, “Oh, let’s do a little bit more digging. Let’s find out a bit more…” Because what I love to do is really delve into the subject to see if I can find anything.

And do you know what you’re looking for, more or less? Or do you just know when you see it?
Oh, it’s usually a light bulb moment. And in this case, I went over to Churchill College – an amazing building. We went into the archive… It’s all pressurised; it keeps all his correspondence and paperwork. The director for the Churchill Archive Centre, Alan Packwood, showed me many of the famous speeches that Churchill did, and explained how he’d dictate them to his secretary… Then the secretary would type them up, and he’d get them back and he might change them…

And in those days, it wasn’t copy, paste, delete, obviously!
No, it was all retyping! And even then, right up to the 11th hour, literally minutes before he stood up in parliament to do his speeches, he might be in the corner changing the speeches with a pen. And I actually had these letters in my hand, the genuine papers with all his handwriting on. And we went through all sorts of things…

And this is what you mean by delving? Rather than just saying: “Sling a photo in a box with a pen”, you’re really exploring it properly…
Exactly. And actually, one of the things I found was that when he was away from home, he used to write to his wife, Clementine… He’d write to her and, at the end, he’d often do a different little drawing of what looks like a bulldog, but the family say is a pug… Because Clementine called him, “My charming pug”… Well, one of these little drawings was brilliant – and that’s the one that we copied onto the top of every Churchill heritage pen.

Right… There, it is! Looks like spindly, abstract bulldog…
That’s it. Meanwhile, Clementine would write back and draw a little cat – because she was his ‘Clemmy Kat’. But all of this you don’t actually hear about in run of the mill conversations about Churchill, do you? So reading these personal letters – that were written 60, 70, 80 years ago – offers a fascinating insight. That’s how we came up with the Churchill Heritage Pen. And actually, we include a facsimile of the actual letter written in Winston Churchill‘s own hand, with his very special drawing of himself as a ‘pug’.

I can see how you can get sucked into this because it’s not, at that point, really about the pen, is it? And what about one of the others you mentioned? Something like Rolls-Royce?
There we go to the other extreme. Rolls-Royce launched 35 Silver Ghost cars. I think they started at a quarter of a million pounds. But they wanted a pen which was unique to this limited edition car, and had the shape of the car as the clip. It’s a very special shape, like a two-door coupé Rolls-Royce.

The clip is?
Yes, And that was difficult to make… We ended up using a spark erosion tool to get the right shape. They also wanted a sterling silver pen that was to be kept in the glove compartment and held there using magnets. So for that, for that, we had to put an inner ferrous sleeve in the sterling silver barrel so that it could sit as if by magic in the glove compartment without moving.

The lengths we went to in development were quite incredible. I used to take prototypes down to Goodwood and all these engineers would be sitting around this room… They’d all be listening to the click to make sure it sounded right. Then they’d put it in the car and drive it round the circuit to make sure it didn’t slide out…

Brilliant. And I didn’t really make the connection, but am I right in saying Conway Stewart pens were also in the film Kingsman?
Yes, we got contacted by the props department because the director, Michael Vaughn, specifically asked about using Conway Stewart pens in the film. I don’t know why, and we didn’t know at the time what the pens were going to be used for…

Not to be impertinent, Alastair, but is this something that you provided in exchange for publicity? For merchandising rights? Or do you sell them to the film?
We produced them and we loaned them. So no, they don’t buy them, and we don’t give them; we loan them. We made about 20 lever-fill pens, And sample points as well as some propelling pencils; all based on the Winston Black and Gold pen… And we sent them off. Once filming had started, they contacted us and said that Michael Caine – as the head of the secret service in this film – wanted a slightly different pen to all the others…

Not many people know that! He wanted a different style?
Yes. And the props department had been on our website and identified a specific pen, but Mr. Caine wanted it in a different colour. It was based on a Marlborough, I think, but in black and gold. And of course they needed it fast! So we made it up and shipped it off. I didn’t think anything more of it until I saw the film – and the pen is actually used to kill Michael Caine in the film.

Yes. The pen is mightier than the sword… Activated poisoned in the whiskey didn’t it?
Was it Whiskey? Or brandy? Either way, the killer then digs the pen into Michael Caine’s neck and pulls out a microchip. After filming ended, we got the pen back. It’s still in my collection and I swear to you there must be some Michael Caine blood at the end of the…

Ha! You’ve got Michael Caine’s DNA! Ha! Well, that’ll be useful in a few years… That’s brilliant.
Later, of course, they wanted to make limited edition merchandise. We wanted it to be a secret-agent thing, so you can only see the Kingsman motto – : ‘Oxfords Not Brogues’ – when you unscrew the cap. It was engraved around the nib ring.

Returning to real life, you were also asked to make a pen with the RAF?
Oh, that was fascinating! They sent me up to RAF Stafford, which is where they keep all their archives. They have a room with all the secret-agent equipment in it. And our spies really did use pens in the Second World War. There were pens that you could unscrew the top of, the cap, and there’d be a little compass in there. And if you unscrewed the barrel, there were silk maps inside. Incredible…

They showed me all the drawings by the man on whom Ian Fleming is said to have based Q, Charles Fraser-Smith. This guy used to draw up secret-agent gadgets… And I’ve actually got copies of the original drawing of a poison-dart pen… I’m not sure if it was ever made! My favourite, though, is a pen that has a small reservoir of ink in it, so you can write with it… But if you open the lever fill and pull from the cap, it comes out as a dagger!

Oh my days!
Just brilliant… All this stuff I get involved in when I’m designing. So it’s a lovely occupation to be in.

With such broad licenses, Alastair, is there something that unites them?
Well, we get contacted all the time by various organisations, and we have those initial chats… I think part of it, though, is that there’s got to be that magic ingredient where the subject’s interesting and the licensor and the licensee get on well together. And all the people that you’re working with are also very excited about it as well…

But in terms of putting your finger on that magic, what’s that secret ingredient?
I think I just get a feeling for it; a feeling that – yes, this is really quite an exciting project. What you don’t want is just a brand looking for the money and not really interested in the product; not really interested in engaging. We don’t get involved in that. We get involved with people that are excited about what they’re doing.

Got it…
The Ashmolean Museum is a good example… We got involved with a project there, the Ashmolean Pen. What a fascinating world to get into! Just walking around the The Ashmolean Museum… As a licensor, they more or less said, “Look, we’ve got 1.3 million artefacts… Let’s show you.” But the people made that such a pleasure. And together, we created a wonderful pen based on John Ruskin’s work. Out of interest, do you know Ian Downes at Start Licensing?

I know Ian, yes. I’m pleased you mentioned his name actually, because I don’t get the chance to sing his praises enough… He’s the salt of the earth. If you want to start licensing, start licensing with Ian Downes! He’s fantastic. So! To wrap things up, Alastair, tell me: what’s the one question I could’ve asked you today but didn’t?
Hmmm. I suppose you could’ve asked about the future of Conway Stewart. Which is good! Conway Stewart is going from strength to strength. Year-on-year sales are growing very healthily,. We’re recruiting more people. We have our little workshop that’s now grown… We started off as one unit, and we’re now in three units… So it’s going in the right direction – and everything we make, everything we sell, we try to ensure it’s made in Britain.

Is that right?
Yes – the ink’s made in Liverpool, all add gold and silver components in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, and our leather products in Stockport… But we export 60% of what we make. Also, if you read our website reviews, you’ll see we have some fantastic comments – and that’s what makes it all worthwhile… That we design something, make it using British suppliers, put it on a website and then someone across the world wants to buy it. Once they get it, they write a review about how wonderful it is! What better business could I be in?

Fantastic! What a great note to end on. Thank you so much, Alastair.